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Online Behavioral Tracking

New web technology has created many unexpected ways for corporations to track your web activity without your knowledge. Countless advertising networks are able to secretly monitor you across multiple websites and build detailed profiles of your behavior and interests.

New threats include "super-cookies " like Adobe's "Local Shared Objects" and Microsoft's "User Data Persistence." They include semi-legal data-sharing agreements between Internet service providers and data warehouses like Phorm and NebuAd. And they include social networking websites that allow advertisers too much access to their users' behavior and data.

EFF is working with lawmakers to close legal loopholes that enable unscrupulous tracking with corporations to teach them how to manage data responsibly and with the media to educate the public about corporate behavior and user rights.

Today, Verizon reached an agreement with the FCC to acquire affirmative consent before injecting their UIDH tracking header into their customers' web activity on non-Verizon owned sites. This is exactly what we asked them to do in November 2014, and is a huge win for Internet privacy. ISPs...

Today we're launching version 2.0 of our tracking and fingerprinting detection tool, Panopticlick. This version brings new tests to our existing tool, such as canvas and touch-capability fingerprinting, updating its ability to uniquely identify browsers with current techniques. In addition, we're adding a brand new suite of tests that...

Yet, the prevalence of these trackers raises consumer questions. Because trackers are invisible, many people are unaware of them and have no inkling of how to dodge them. “It’s definitely a privacy concern,” said Cooper Quintin, a technologist and privacy advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There’s no mechanism for...

Good news for Firefox users sick of online trackers shadowing their every click: Mozilla just released Tracking Protection for use with their private browsing mode. As we wrote previously, we think it's important for users to be able to protect themselves from non-consensual online tracking. That's why we...

What if using the Web didn’t mean sacrificing your privacy? We’ve spent years thinking about simple ways for everyday users to demand real privacy online. And, working in consultation with privacy experts across the globe, we’ve got a blueprint for addressing one particularly challenging privacy dilemma: online tracking. EFF just...